TV review: Kids in Care and The Invention of Dr Nakamats

'What is it like to grow up with the state as a parent?" asked Panorama at the start of Kids in Care (BBC1). Pretty bloody rubbish, is the short answer. Three-year-old Conor has had four placements with families since he went into care, including one failed adoption. "Stop!" he cries, throwing his arms around their legs whenever a member of his current foster family tries to leave the house. "Kiss me!" He reminds you of those terrible clips you used to see of baby monkeys deprived of their mothers desperately clinging on to fake-fur covered mock-ups in their little cages.

The teenagers are sadder and therefore badder. Shannon, 14, has been in care since she was eight and now appeared to be following her mother (who was also in care as a child and has had her three other children removed from her) down the drink and drugs path, staying out late and becoming the despair of the staff at her children's home, The Grange in Coventry.

Fellow resident Conner, 14, has had a dozen foster placements since he was three. He is desperate for unsupervised visits to his mother – disallowed by the social workers as she once absconded with him – but an offered compromise sends him into a fury. He attacks his social worker's car, who has to drive off with Conner's bloody knuckleprints on his windows. Not for the first time for either of them, the relationship between child and professional comes to a swift and unfortunate end.

No matter how dedicated the social workers that are gathered round these confused and damaged children, parental – and particularly maternal – love seems irreplaceable. The children palpably long to be returned to their mothers at all costs, and their absence leaves a void that is filled with misery, despair and rage. As ever, Panorama set out the situation dispassionately, carefully avoiding any kind of demonisation of the social workers, children or parents. Somehow, that only made the subject matter all the more clearly insoluble, and agonising.

Being an octogenarian Japanese inventor instead of a child in care seems to be the secret to a happy life. Yoshiro Nakamatsu – also known as Dr Nakamats – is the 82-year-old holder of 3,357 patents for devices he has invented, including a perpetual motion machine that runs on heat and cosmic energy, a soy sauce pump and the floppy disk. He eats one meal a day (which, for the last 34 years, he has photographed, analysed and used to create a brain tea that will help everyone live until the age of 144, as he intends to) and sleeps just four hours a night. He keeps fit by wrestling. "Once I beat 10 persons," he tells the Danish visual artist, Kaspar Astrup Schröder, who made the documentary The Invention of Dr Nakamats (More4). "Even big ones." In quieter moments he visits the grave of his beloved mother, whose death he does not yet accept. "She physically died at the age of 102," he explains by her headstone. "I don't mean she's not here, it's just . . ." He tails off. Sometimes you need to invent new words, and they come harder than brain teas or perpetual motion machines.

He is revered in Japan, in demand on the lecture circuit, besieged by entrepreneurs (whom he berates at length if he perceives any disrespect towards the intellectual effort that went into his creations) and greeted with awe by passers-by. Maybe they are all users of his Love Jet invention – a potion that women can wear behind their ears or spray on their genitals, which removes the need for foreplay. "I have tested about 10,000 women," he says. "I am not doing the sex. I check the meters."

A quick rootle round the internet will unearth many challenges to Nakamats' claims. IBM, for example, disputes that he invented the floppy disk, and I daresay there are alternative versions of his assertion that he invented karaoke. But the film does not mention them, preferring – rightly – simply to revel in the invention of Nakamats himself. Is he a genuinely talented scientist or a master of media manipulation? Occasionally, there seems to be a flash of something suggesting self-awareness. He turns up to receive the Ig Nobel Science Award for his longevity-enhancing tea and accepts it with the words "Life should be longer. Speech should be short". He's some kind of genius, that's for sure, and so is Schröder for resisting the temptation to chase down all his ambiguities – leaving us instead with a beguiling film.